Avi Dichter says program leads to connection to Israel for young people and government should pay more.

04/11/2011 - 20:00

Stewart Ain

Staff Writer

Avi Dichter, a former head of Israel’s Shin Bet (internal security service) and a former minister of internal security, is a Knesset member from the Kadima Party. He was one of six Knesset members who spent last week meeting with Jewish leaders here and in Boston to learn about the American Jewish community as part of a new effort launched by the Ruderman Fellows Program and Brandeis University. The Jewish Week caught up with him for a wide-ranging interview touching on everything from diaspora Jewry to the Goldstone report to Israel’s new missile-defense system.

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Legislation calling on the United Nations to rescind the Goldstone report is circulating in both houses of Congress.

A Senate resolution, introduced April 8 by Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and James Risch (R-Idaho), calls on the U.N. Human Rights Council to "reflect the author’s repudiation of the Goldstone report’s central findings, rescind the report, and reconsider further Council actions with respect to the report’s findings."

After the judge’s surprise mea culpa, Israel advocates hurry to undo the damage.

04/04/2011 - 20:00

Stewart Ain

Staff Writer

In the Book of Esther read on Purim, King Ahasuerus tells Queen Esther that he cannot revoke his edict calling for the destruction of the Jews but that he would issue a new decree allowing the Jews to defend themselves.

Israel’s consul for media affairs in New York, Joel Lion, offered similar advice this week to the American Jewish community following the surprise mea culpa by Richard Goldstone.

Richard Goldstone’s narrow, qualified mea culpa on the infamous report he issued as chair of a fact-finding mission appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, on what happened during the 2008-2009 Gaza war, raises more questions than it answers.

JERUSALEM (JTA) -- The United Nations Human Rights Council said it will continue to use the Goldstone Report as written, despite its author's retraction of a key finding.

Council spokesman Cedric Sapey told the Israeli daily Yediot Achronot on Monday that the Op-Ed written by Richard Goldstone appearing in The Washington Post of April 2 was his personal opinion and not that of the rest of the committee.

I'm trying to figure out exactly what it means that Richard Goldstone, the international jurist who presided over a UN report on the Gaza war that Israel and its friends considered outrageously biased, has repudiated its central findings.

There's little doubt that's good news to the Jewish groups here that made Goldstone a new poster boy for UN hostility to the Jewish state. Clearly it hurts the credibility of pro-peace process groups - including J Street - that came to Goldstone's defense after the report was released.

(JTA) -- The northern California home of Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the progressive Tikkun magazine, was vandalized for the third time in less than a year.

Tuesday's attack came a day after Lerner presented the Tikkun Award for ethics to South African Justice Richard Goldstone at a celebration of Tikkun’s 25th anniversary attended by more than 600 people at the University of California, Berkeley.

As the J Street – George Soros controversy goes into it second full week, here's a quick update on a few of the threads entangling the pro-Israel, pro-peace process group.

1. The controversy is solidifying into familiar lines, with ardent supporters blaming the press for heaping fuel on a relatively minor matter – the failure of J Street's leaders to tell the truth about Soros contributions – and detractors piling on with real criticism and outright hyperbole.